Richard Boyd Barrett (Dún Laoghaire, People Before Profit Alliance) | Oireachtas source

The Taoiseach and Tánaiste have lost all interest in the budget. I suspect the wider public have lost interest anyway because they realise through bitter experience it will not make much difference to the real issues that affect their lives. I will not go through an exhaustive list of what is not there or what we would have done instead. People can read our alternative budget submission and I am sure we will be debating many of individual items over the next while and during the election campaign.

I want to focus on a few things and will start with the health service. Yesterday the Government announced an additional €3 billion for the health service, implying that this will help improve the quality of the health service. The lie involved in that was exposed this morning by health worker representatives from the INMO and SIPTU. This is something I have tried to highlight for some weeks since I got wind of it as a result of being contacted by health workers in the local hospital St. Michael's Hospital. I initially thought it was something specific and local, but having spoken to the unions an hearing from elsewhere, I have now discovered it is a much more general deception the Government is engaged in to hide what it is doing in the health service, which gives the lie to any notion that anything in the budget represents a serious attempt to address the crisis in the health service, namely the pay and numbers strategy.

During the summer the Government announced it was lifting the recruitment embargo, a recruitment embargo that it never admitted existed, but at exactly the same time it imposed that embargo by another name, the pay and numbers strategy. What that means, as explained in great detail by representatives of the nurses and midwives organisation and SIPTU this morning is that rather than the Government complying with its own commitments under the framework for nursing and midwifery and for safe staffing in our hospitals, it has set a staff ceiling on posts in our hospitals and in the health services. This, which was set in the summer, was benchmarked against whatever posts happened to be filled in September 2023 and consequently posts that were not filled in that period were suppressed; they literally disappeared. Even though the INMO cannot get accurate figures from the HSE because the HSE does not want to admit the truth about this, it estimates that about 2,000 nursing and midwifery posts have simply disappeared. They have been suppressed because those posts were filled back in 2023 and now they have disappeared.

Rather than the funding allocations of the Government being based on what represents safe staffing levels in our hospitals in all areas, not just for nurses and midwives, but for doctors, caterers, porters, support staff, radiographers, physiotherapists and I could go through the list, the numbers are being based on budgetary limits and staff quotas being set on an arbitrary basis by the Department of public expenditure, leaving our hospitals chronically understaffed and critically failing to meet the requirements for patient safety, for safe staffing levels.

We will have a public meeting in Dún Laoghaire tonight which I was asked to hold by staff in the local hospital. They are telling me horror stories about the unsafe staffing levels. The public health nurse whom I met at the INMO briefing last week said that 11 public health nurse posts in our area were suppressed because they were not filled as of December last year.

The INMO and SIPTU both believe that this is actually linked to a deliberate agenda for privatisation. The posts are not filled or are suppressed. If that work needs to be done it is outsourced to private companies. As Phil Ní Sheaghdha from the INMO pointed out this morning, while the Government says the problem is we cannot recruit people, is it not interesting that the private agencies can recruit health staff, nurses and so on who are on inferior pay and conditions, but the HSE cannot? It is not that it cannot but that the Government will not fund the posts, is suppressing the posts and does not want to recruit the necessary staff and meet the commitments under the framework for safe staffing. They also cited the Government's failure to progress the patient safety licensing Bill which would also legally enshrine the requirement for safe staffing levels in the health service.

In simple terms all that means is the crisis with scoliosis waiting lists, nearly 1 million people waiting for surgeries and 600 people on trolleys today, will continue because we do not simply have the safe levels of staffing, ratios that are necessary between nurses, midwives and other healthcare professionals and the number of patients that are being dealt with in the health service. The misery and the lack of safety for patients will continue in our health service.

It is interesting that having actually done something about it and having exposed it, today, on the day we are having the public meeting because outrage is being expressed locally, I get a letter from Ireland East Hospital Group saying it is now planning to fill 21 new posts in St. Michael's Hospital which have been left unfilled, leading to chaos and demoralisation in hospital. That shows that when workers and the community begin to get up and do something, it can force a bit of change.

This is why I will be fully supporting the protests of Fórsa, the INMO and SIPTU at a number of hospitals tomorrow. I hope they continue to escalate the protests to force the Government to staff our hospitals and fund our health services properly.

In the brief time available to me I will mention the housing situation. I went through this yesterday. It is absolutely shocking that with regard to the 33,000 houses a year the Government is planning to deliver year on year in Housing For All, the Housing Commission can tell us what we all knew anyway, and what the Government did not want to admit, namely, that this is less than half of what we actually need. We actually need 60,000 and more likely 70,000 houses a year and, in line with this, we need to double the amount of social and affordable housing we will deliver. Incredibly, with €13 billion from Apple, a total budget surplus of €23.7 billion and a projected surplus of €6 billion next year, the Government has not changed the planned output of social and affordable housing for next year. It is exactly the same as it was for this year, a woefully inadequate figure guaranteeing that the housing misery of those on social housing waiting lists and those looking for affordable housing will continue.

When we look at the affordable housing being delivered in Shanganagh, the lowest price is €330,000 and prices range up to €390,000. We still do not know the cost of the cost rental units but a figure of €1,300 is flying around. A single income family will have no chance of securing affordable or cost rental housing. They simply could not afford it. Interestingly, the number of HAP tenancies the Government is supporting has dropped by 10,000 this year. The Government says it will expand it by another 10,000. Why did the number decrease by 10,000 last year? By and large, it is because of evictions and people being evicted into homelessness. The budget really is a sham with regard to addressing the two biggest crises facing this country, in housing and health.

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